


The elimination of possibilities, the drawing of conclusions.

by PepperCat



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Guilt, M/M, Nightmares, Self-Hatred, Sleepwalking, Teenage Crush, mistaken conclusions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-06
Updated: 2018-06-06
Packaged: 2019-05-18 23:36:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14862458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PepperCat/pseuds/PepperCat
Summary: He was maybe fifteen, and the coolest guy ever started talking to him. Andkepttalking to him. It was their secret, it mattered.What was Axel supposed to think?





	The elimination of possibilities, the drawing of conclusions.

**Author's Note:**

> I generally believe that Axel Walker and James Jesse aren't biologically related, but I think this fic stands either way.
> 
> I also want to flag that while Hartley is focussed on encouraging Axel that he didn’t do anything wrong, there is also absolutely nothing wrong with being a teenager and _not_ getting any kind of crush on stars, teachers, or other authority figures that you admire. Some of us are wired that way too.

Hartley could sleep through what was, by his lights, a truly prodigious amount of noise. But like anyone who'd ever looked across the room at what they thought was the sound of their own name, he was attuned to particular sounds. And some things were just unsettling enough that they could catch your attention.

Hollow laughing and slow footsteps going down the hallway in the middle of the night was one example.

Hartley realized he wasn't dreaming and snapped the light on, grabbed for his glasses and fumbled them on. No-one was in the room. No-one was _coming_ into the room, and he could hear the noise, and it was definitely not coming closer.

"Axel?" he said softly. It sounded like Axel might if Axel was exhausted or had a cold, a sort of low slow echo of one of his roommate's usual laughs.

The laughing didn't stop. It was coming from the hallway, now from the living room, and Hartley didn't _think_ there was anyone else in the house, he couldn't hear anything but the person laughing and the rats and the sound of the house settling in the night.

Hartley called Axel's name louder, hurried out of his room when he heard the silvery whisper of leather and spikes from what he was sure was the coatrack in the living room. None of the lights inside were on but the lights from the parking lot across the street were pressing orange trapezoids in through the windows and he saw his roommate fumbling with his coat, the _Trickster_ coat, as if he meant to put it on and go outside barefoot wearing nothing but that and boxers.

"Axel!" he said sharply, a third time, and Axel dropped the coat. He didn't seem to notice, moved his hands back over his shoulders and stretched his arms out as if he was putting it on. His eyes were open and gazing blankly at the wall, and that laughing wasn't stopping, a slow sob of air that had absolutely _nothing_ funny about it—

Hartley grabbed Axel's arm.

The laughter turned into what Hartley would, in the interests of diplomacy, refer to a shout if he ever needed to recount this incident in the future. He ducked and let go, stepping back as Axel's swing went over his head, and then back again to avoid any followup. "Axel," he said again.

"—hell're you doing in—" Axel swallowed, and Hartley could hear his heartbeat, still racing but at least slowing a little. He looked around, pressed his hands to his face. Hartley could see his eyes between his fingers, flicking across the living room.

"Pipes?" Axel said shakily.

Hartley bit back something about the fashion choice Axel had nearly inflicted on Keystone and settled for "You seemed to be trying to go outside."

Axel looked down at himself and noticed the coat on the floor. He didn't bend to pick it up, just stood there looking down at it, and then pressed his hands over his eyes. He was shivering.

"Axel?" Hartley said, more gently than you could reasonably be expected to manage when talking to someone who'd woken you up and just tried to punch you in the middle of the night.

"'m having a bad dream," Axel said, voice muffled behind his hands.

Hartley tried to remember if anyone had ever been around when he'd woken up with bad dreams. He couldn't recall a specific instance where that had happened, which was the sort of thing that might be depressing if you dwelt on it overmuch. "It's just a dream," he offered.

Axel shook his head.

"Alright, then." Hartley hesitated for a second, then took a step closer. Axel turned to look at him as he pulled off his housecoat and held it out. Hartley had yanked it on out of reflex when he'd left his room and come hurrying down the hall; it would be a little short on Axel, but it was something. "You look cold."

Axel took the housecoat and shrugged it on. "Fucked up," he said, softly enough that Hartley wasn't sure if anyone else would have heard, and hiccupped out another laugh. "Fucked up, fucked up, so fucked up..."

"I'll get the lights—" Hartley started and then Axel grabbed his arm, hard enough to hurt a little.

"Don't."

"Alright."

"I fucked up." Axel wasn't looking at Hartley, and Hartley couldn't tell if the other man was actually properly awake. He was fair to certain he could make out the sounds of the rats, all the rats. When he'd fallen asleep, Axel had been watching what sounded like old news reports and playing music. If his roommate had gone from that to going outside and doing something that upset him this much, Hartley wasn't entirely sure he'd have followed it up with sneaking home and cleaning up and quietly going to sleep, but...

"What did you do?"

"Nothing!" The grip Axel had on his arm tightened. "There was this one guy, but nothing, that's— I didn't _do_ anything! Just to him, he said—" Axel hiccuped laughter again, scrubbed at his eyes with the back of his free hand.

"Axel," Hartley said, calmly enough given circumstances which boiled down to _restrained within arm's reach of a_ _deeply upset_ _Trickster_ , "tell me what you did to him and where."

"Nothing," Axel said again, and then "Heights, right, Iron Heights. Took his face off. Bits." He made a plucking motion in the air near his own face that was remarkably evocative. "That's not it. Don't tell Ice Dad, okay?" He tried for a smile, and it broke and faded as he actually looked at Hartley. "Don't, please?"

Hartley blinked. "Don't tell Len that you mauled someone in Iron Heights?" Axel shook his head, and Hartley thought it was _no, you've got it wrong_ rather than _no, don't do that_. "Alright, _what_ is the problem here?"

"No." Axel shook his head again. "No. It's— You're okay, right?"

"I'm fine, but you're holding on a little tightly—"

"No, you're _okay_ , right?" Axel waved his free hand in the air. "Like, you're not..." He swallowed. "You're not creepy."

"I try to keep it down to merely annoying," Hartley said. He wondered if Axel had been having one of those nightmares where you kept dreaming you'd woken up only to have something new and terrible happen.

He'd never imagined the possibility of being unsettling to Axel Walker.

"What exactly do you consider creepy?"

Axel made a frustrated noise and raked his hand back through his hair. "You. You had a guy, right? That Wells guy?"

...a small fraction of Hartley was wishing that he hadn't woken up to the sound of laughter.

Axel let go of Hartley's arm and stalked across the living room, hands picking at his hair, whipped around and started back. "That was him, yeah?" he said. "That guy?"

"I worked for Dr. Wells, yes." Hartley's voice sounded flat even to his own ears.

"Awh, he was a geek hero," Axel said. "Before." He laced his hands behind his neck, stretched his head back, giggled a little, high and thin. "Like for years. You must've thought he was cool for _years_."

"I thought he was brilliant," Hartley said in a clipped voice. "I admired that. Yes."

"Long time?"

"Long enough."

"How'd you meet him? Like— when'd you—" Axel laughed again, no warmer or steadier than the last time. "I bet it made your fucking day."

"He was _entirely_ professional." The iciness in Hartley's voice would have impressed Leonard Snart, and instead of the sharpness he'd expected in response, Axel's face crumpled.

"Yeah, but _you_ —" Axel put one hand up to his face again. "Pipes, you _cared_ , right? You would've anyway?"

"Anyway? Axel, what—"

"If it was different?" Axel cracked a smile, half-hidden behind the hand up to his face and bitter as grief. "If you were normal, fucking human, you— fuck you, glass, princess, so fucking _perfect_ , like you ever cared 'bout someone in your _life_ —"

" _Axel!_ "

That was as sharp as Hartley was willing to go. He could do more—he'd once broken out a passable imitation of James Jesse's voice that had cut right through everything Axel had been distracted by and made the other man _listen_ —but he really didn't want to go there.

He didn't need to. Axel stopped babbling, at least. His heart was still racing, but at least it wasn't getting faster.

"Axel," Hartley said a little more calmly. Wished anyone else was here, but he wasn't very well going to leave Axel standing distraught and confused in the dark. "What did you mean, if it was different?"

"If you cared," Axel said. He brought his hand down from his face, but he still wouldn't look at Hartley; he wrapped his arms around himself instead, and was talking half into the shoulder of the housecoat. "About your— Wells. What he thought."

Hartley bit back a very sharp response. "His opinion mattered to me," he said instead after a minute. "I'm not sure what you're looking for."

Axel sighed. "There's this guy," he said. "This fucking guy, the brightest thing you've ever seen, the _best_. You get that bit?"

"Sure." He thought Axel's shoulders dropped a little at the agreement. Not much, a fraction of an inch.

"Okay," Axel said. "He's— you'd been talking to him. He'd been talking to you. He _listens_ , _he_ listens, it's— he _gets_ you, right? For— for ages. Sees you. Lets you help him. Lets you work on this _fantastic_ thing he's got planned, this spectacular..." Axel trailed off and giggled again.

"It's amazing," he said. "You get it all right, everything ready for him. It's going great. It's perfect. You're finally—" Axel stepped up and put his hands on Hartley's shoulders, leaned in. "You're _finally in the room_ with him," and his breath was warm on Hartley's face. "You see? This guy, he's _right there_ , so close you can see him breathing, actually get to watch him work. And you don't totally get the plan details but this is the best thing you've ever been a part of and you wanna know what he thinks of you, wanna _hear_ it." Axel's eyes were bright as broken glass, and his smile was wide and bright, and Hartley could hear his heart racing.

"You get this mood, Pipes?" he said, his voice easing a little, going soft and dark. "You're thinking— I don't know, not _thinking_ , around a guy like that you just wanna run with whatever— so you ask why he chose you, wanna know what he sees—"

Axel stopped and breathed in.

"—and he says he's your _father_."

Hartley flinched. Axel chuckled.

"See?" he said softly. So close, Hartley could see that his eyes were shining, even in the dark. "You _get_ it, right?"

"That would be unexpected," Hartley said. His mouth was dry. Axel nodded.

"I didn't," he said. " _Anything_. I didn't, I never did, I never did anything, and after I knew— the one guy who liked to joke about it, Pipes, no-one's ever gonna wanna look at him again. Just—" He leaned forward, pressing his forehead against Hartley's. "Back when it was letters— it was a while— it— ten _years_ , you know? I thought about—" He hiccupped, and the words began spilling out faster, his fingers digging in. "I stopped, I don't _now_ , he's my _dad_ , watched the old news 'cause I missed him I had a bad fucking _dream_ — fucking gross, 'm a fucking creep, he's my _dad_ , I gotta be better, I can't be _like_ that, Pipes, he'd hate— I _don't_ —"

"Axel—" Hartley understood the convention at this point was saying _it's alright_ and it clearly wasn't, so he couldn't manage that, put his hands awkwardly around Axel and on his back instead. Nothing so close as a hug, he didn't think you could call it that, but he pitched his voice low and clear and tried to agree with the parts that seemed important, _I know you don't, Axel, of course you don't_ , over and over until Axel at least stopped insisting so much and Hartley thought he could get a word in edgewise.

Alright.

He thought he was going to have bruises on his shoulders in the shape of Axel's fingers, but that was the sort of thing that Mick would probably dismiss as a twenty-minutes-from-now problem, and he set it aside. Axel still had his forehead pressed to Hartley's, eyes closed, and if he hadn't been keeping his balance and muttering Hartley could not have sworn that he hadn't fallen back asleep.

"Axel," he said, a little louder than the stream of reassurances. "I'm not telling Len about this, but you need to listen to me. Alright?"

"He'd kill me," quiet and tired.

Hartley realized he wasn't sure if Axel was talking about Leonard Snart or James Jesse and didn't really want to try to figure out which. Probably Len, and if so Hartley was sure he was wrong, but he set it aside.

"Listen," he said again, and Axel gave a very tired head-bob. "You said I'm not a creep. It's true. I'm boring." He moved one of his hands up to pat at Axel's shoulder. "I'm the nice one. You made fun of me for it the first time we met, remember?"

"So what?"

"I was once a teenager."

Axel sniffle-choked in a way that was sort of like a laugh. "You were born like fucking forty."

"Only for tax purposes," Hartley said, which was nonsense but Axel made that sniffle-choke noise again so he counted it a small plus.

"My point is," he continued, "growing up, I did not spend lot of time with my peers. I did have several tutors, who were universally selected for being more skilled than me in areas I actually cared about. What I found..." He trailed off, and if Axel didn't say anything, at least he didn't start talking again. Hartley hadn't really cared for the self-recriminating aspect of a lot of what had been said.

"From what I remember, as a teenager, when you meet someone you admire—and especially when someone you admire pays attention to you—there's a fairly natural inclination to..." He hesitated for a second. "...to daydream about a relationship. There's nothing wrong with that."

Axel muttered something in which the words "...my _dad_." featured prominently.

"Alright," Hartley said. "But the announcement of a family relationship came as a shock, because it was new to you. Even if you'd imagined, you wouldn't have taken it seriously without some indication on his part." He felt a motion that he thought was a nod, might have just been Axel slipping back towards sleep. "And obviously he's smart enough to know that, right?"

He thought he'd kept the judgment out of his voice. He probably had. It was just that what he was saying might be read as leading up to a criticism of James Jesse, and that was the sort of thing that sometimes hit a nerve.

" _He didn't do anything wrong._ " Axel was glaring and not backing away _at all_ , and Hartley tried not to think about the plucking gesture from earlier and mostly managed. "You get that?"

"I get that," Hartley said. "Believe me, I am not trying to malign him to you right now."

"He could've taken _twenty_ years if he wanted to say it, it'd be okay. You see?"

"I see."

"Family—not like what you have, Pipes, _good_ family—it's..." He sighed and closed his eyes, and after a minute Hartley felt some of the tension go out of Axel's fingers.

"I'm not saying he did anything wrong, Axel. Alright? That is not where this is going."

Axel nodded.

"Whatever reason he had for not bringing it up earlier—" and Hartley had several extremely uncharitable thoughts on the matter, but much as he wanted to share them he knew they would not get listened to right now— "he put a lot of time into building the relationship, and— honestly, he knew you were invested in him, right?"

Axel made a soft _heh_ noise. It didn't shake as much as his voice had earlier, and his heartbeat was steadying down.

"He had a lot of time to figure this out," Hartley said. "He was okay with what he did. I can't imagine he'd be disgusted by you being a— a starstruck teenager reacting to the information that he gave you, or by you adjusting on the fly to a new relationship."

"Still thought it," Axel said. He let go of Hartley, hugged himself again and huddled back down. He was talking into the shoulder of the housecoat again and Hartley was faintly glad that the garment was loosely cut. The seams on a tailored shirt would have at least stretched. "Pipes," Axel said, voice muffled by the terrycloth. "I had such a fucking bad dream."

"I know." Hartley wasn't sure if he should give Axel space, but the other man wasn't actually backing away, so he patted him on the arm instead. "You missed him and you watched the things you used to watch, and you tripped over one bad memory you didn't want but that wasn't wrong at the time. _One_. It doesn't mean you think any of it now, okay?"

Axel shrugged, but it turned into something closer to a nod partway through.

Hartley hesitated, not thinking he was quite ready to leave Axel alone yet. "Do you want a glass of water?" he said, but this time Axel shook his head.

"You tired?" he said instead. He took a deep breath and sighed, then straightened and pulled his head away from the housecoat shoulder. Hartley had the oddest feeling he'd been sniffing at the fabric. "I'm not tired."

Hartley looked at Axel, decided a more truthful statement was _I don't want to go back to sleep_ , and nodded.

"I don't mind sitting up for a little," he said. "If you'd like the company."

**Author's Note:**

> The title is a riff off both that Shelock Holmes line about eliminating the impossible, and a Samuel Butler quote that runs "Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises."
> 
> The twenty-minutes-from-now thing that Hartley attributes to Mick is something I ran across in a [John Rogers post](http://thrillbent.com/blog/3-point-plotting/)\--co-creator of _Leverage_ , really worth listening to when he talks about stories.
> 
> The incident at Iron Heights that Axel is referring to is in [chapter 3](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11171289/chapters/25635240) of "[Fish in the Jailhouse](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11171289)", second-last section before the end.
> 
> It was hard to write this one from Hartley's perspective, since he is at best guessing at what's going through Axel's head and really more focussed on making it stop, but I think it turned out okay.


End file.
